Nowadays, in accordance with a development of a digital technology, technologies capable of analyzing and classifying image information into specific regions or specific portions have been developed. A face recognition technology among these analyzing technologies, which is a technology integrated with a digital camera as well as an apparatus performing a security technology, or the like, has been studied and developed in various ways from various angles.
In addition, a research into a system authenticating identity of an individual using biological characteristics such as a genetic signature, a fingerprint, a voice, a vein, a face shape, a pupil, an iris, or the like, has been actively carried out. Among these, a pupil recognition field is expected to be used the most in the future for a security system due to advantages such as a high recognition ratio, unforgeability, pattern characteristics of a large amount of data, no changing factor, and the like.
In order to implement the above-mentioned pupil recognition, an interest region is determined by extracting face and eye regions based on an image and the pupil and a lighting reflect point are then extracted from an eye interest region, thereby calculating a line of sight direction vector. However, since a computing amount of data for extracting the pupil becomes large, this process is time-consuming.